


What Happens in Vegas

by DustyForgotten



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Break Up, Drama & Romance, F/M, One-Sided Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-17
Updated: 2018-05-17
Packaged: 2019-05-08 02:50:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14684901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DustyForgotten/pseuds/DustyForgotten
Summary: Wasteland gets in the way.





	What Happens in Vegas

He’s halfway to a hickey, one hand in her back pocket and trying not to grin like an idiot. Six shifts to her tiptoes to graze his earlobe with her teeth, and inquires a quiet, “Hey…”

Swank swallows while he finds his voice, and buries his nose in the leather-clothed crook of her shoulder. “Yeah, doll?”

“I love you.”

His hands come to her hips; the leather on his fingertips feels real. Warm. Moves them up to her cheeks, and her face between them is the same as he remembers. “You pulling my leg?”

One eyebrow quirks up, and Erin clamps his thigh between her own. “Now why would I do that?”

Swank’s a Boot Rider in his soul; he’s burned houses, and wrestled bighorners, and he can kill six ways from Sunday— but he’s a hopeless romantic. He kisses her, soft as his heart, and says, “God, Erin, I  _ love _ you.” Can’t keep their lips apart for long. “You know that.”

She kisses hard, and they fuck like it’s the first time.

* * *

 

Swank’s still a Mojave man, up with the sun and not out until the candles die— which really begs the question of how Erin’s always gone by the time he wakes. It’s something he’s gotten used to: like her bad humour, her missing leg, and fluorescent lighting. He smacks his alarm at the first beep, and the monotony of his morning routine is interrupted for the texture under his fingertips.

Leather.

She’s scrubbing her damp hair with his towel, walking around nude from the waist up— not a line you could draw on her body that hasn’t been cut at some point— and glorious. “What’re you doin’ here?”

“Procrastinating,” she grumbles, tossing the towel at him. It lands over one of his eyes, but he shakes his head, and it slides off without having to free either of his arms. “Got a long trip ahead.”

“Where you headed?”

She wrestles with a sports bra, and it very nearly wins. “Irradiated shithole out east.”

“Know when you’re gonna be back?”

Back to him as she pulls her shirt on from wherever it landed the night before, she shrugs. “Don’t wait up.”

Swank shifts the sheets away, but she waves dismissively. “I can see the door from here, and you got time. Alarm was for me.”

“Must be a big deal to get you out in daylight.”

She’s albino, and it shows: bright and unreal. Sunscreen slathers her skin, and a fedora casts an eerie shadow over her eyes, like those training videos Not-At-Home pitched to him. Six sits on his desk chair to tug at the laces of boots that hold her whole body together, and he’ll never get work done there with that image in his head. “Not really. Just…” Erin pauses with the laces in her hands, like a ligature that’s killing him. “Felt like time, you know?”

Swank rolls over some, and she looks a little distant. Maybe his eyes haven’t adjusted. “I dig, dollface.”

They’ve never had a morning after, he realizes— just bruises and whatever fell out of her pockets jammed between the cushions and hiding under furniture— always left alone with the smell on his bedsheets and a routine that comes too easy to keep him sane. He chats up pretty women and thinks of her, talks down stubborn men and sees Maria in every nine millimetre he confiscates.

She takes the jacket from his bedside table, and pulls it over each arm in turn. Straightens it out like some expensive suit, and combs the hair out of his face with her fingers. “I’m gonna miss you.”

Swank cocks a brow at her, but doesn’t press. “Feeling’s mutual.” He steals a kiss to her fingertips when the hand stills, and Erin smiles that way with all her teeth and a ducked head to hide them. “I love you,” he calls to her back, and she pauses with a hand on the doorknob.

“Swank, you’re pathetic,” Six complains, swinging the door open and stepping outside. “Love you, too.”

He nearly falls into a dream so disgustingly domestic he could never live it down, but he can’t help but check the time.

He feels the cold gold engraving, smooth Mother of Pearl inlaid on a grip— Benny’s sidearm, Erin’s trophy— the weapon that’s twisted politics like radiation twirls your DNA.

She always chooses a dress to show off her scars, only sits through dinner since it’s on his dime, wants to walk to the end of the Strip after, heels in her hand, more interested in his history than what Swank studied himself into…

Maria belongs to Vegas, but Erin is a woman of the Wastes.


End file.
